The Top Twenty-Five Most Influential Articles in Surgery for Colorectal Cancer

This article provides surgical trainees with a ranked list of the foundational literature that guides the contemporary surgical management of colorectal cancer and shows the evolution of surgical techniques in the field.

We assessed the surgical literature using the Web of Science and other ranking systems to create a ranked list of published articles on colorectal cancer surgery.

We compiled a ranked list of the top 25 articles in the surgical management of colorectal cancer, based on the citation density score (mean number of citations per year) and the individual author H-index. The mean density score of the 25 papers was 29.9, and the journal most frequently represented on our list was the Annals of Surgery (36% of top papers). The Web of Science (primary) and alternative databases (secondary) H-index values for each author were identified. The range, mean, and median of the primary H-index values were 7.0-84.0, 31.8, and 29.0, respectively. The range, mean, and median of secondary H-index values were 4.0-108.0, 48.6, and 45.0, respectively. A 2-tailed, unpaired t-test was used to determine whether a significant difference existed between the primary and secondary H-index values for primary authors; P = .0376 (95% confidence interval, 1.02-32.58). A citation density score was calculated for each article, which represented the mean number of citations per year.

We provided a ranked list (citation density score) of the top-cited 25 articles in colorectal cancer surgery, a ranking of the associated primary authors by H-index, and a comparison of H-index scores between primary and secondary database sources. We believe this list is a useful resource for surgical trainees and researchers in colorectal cancer field and provides easy access to the top papers in this discipline.